Blindsight (Firefall, #1)

by Peter Watts

Saccades

“That thing, that thing Amanda’s robot fried—it developed that strategy on its own, on the spot. It improvised.”

“Well, it didn’t work, did it? Couldn’t keep it up in front of more than one or two of us.”

Agnosias

even their retarded children can rewire our brains on the fly, and I can’t tell you how fucking scared that should make you.”

Then Sarasti’s disembodied voice rang forth through the drum. “Everyone to Commons. Robert wants to share.”

they’re logic gates. Scramblers time-share.

It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual.”

“Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most likely.”

For all we know we’ve already given them Theseus’s technical specs, warned them about the Icarus Array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.” “We can cause those effects,” Sarasti said coolly. “As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.” “Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.”

Sarasti was practicing psychology.

have years yet. Centuries.” “We have fifteen days,” Sarasti announced. “Oh shit,” someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha. For some reason everyone was looking at me. Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number?

Chelsea died thinking I just didn’t give a shit.

She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It’s important.

The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven’s occupants. It rewrote a regulatory gene controlling ossification on chromosome 4, and rigged a metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.

I just couldn’t find an algorithm that fit.

He’s snapped, I thought. He’s insane. And then, No, he’s a transient. He’s always been a transient— “They could do better,” he said softly. —and he’s been hiding for days. Deep down. Hiding from the seals. What else would he do?

this what you meant?” James cried from some dark irrelevant hiding place. “Is this your preconditioning?” Sarasti shook me. “Are you in there, Keeton?” My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried.

“Get out of your room, Keeton,” it hissed. “Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?” And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.

“It’s true,” Sarasti told her, “that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you’re flightless birds on a remote island. You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.”

“We stop racing long ago,” the demon said at last. “It’s not our fault you don’t leave it at that.” “Ah.” Cunningham again. “Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—” “No,” Bates said. “Satisfied?” the demon asked. “If you mean the grunts, I’m satisfied you’re out of them,” Bates said. “If you mean— It was completely unwarranted, Jukka.” “It isn’t.” “You assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig you’d be in it for the rest of the trip.”

“It doesn’t bug you?” Sascha was saying. “Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?”

“So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it’s expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution’s gonna weed it out just like that.”

“You’re not thinking this through,” Cunningham said. “We’re not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence.”

If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd.”

It could write letters home, impersonate real Human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence.”

“Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— Wait, you’re saying the world’s corporate elite are nonsentient?” “God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they’re just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees.” “Yeah, but sociopaths don’t blend in well.”

“Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know?”

For once in your goddamned life, understand something. He’d said that to me. Or something had. During the assault. Understand that your life depends on it. Almost as if he were doing me a favor.

Not even the Synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn’t take the strain.

don’t play people.”

“And you. You’re a shapeshifter. You present a different face to every one of us, and I’ll wager none of them is real. The real you, if it even exists, is invisible…”

“I— Not really,” I said. “The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—” “Close, though, wasn’t it? Same size, same general body plan.” “So what?” “Why didn’t you report it?” “I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach.”

“you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle.”

“You figured it out. From Rorschach’s architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least”—he drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED—“part of you did.

But they can’t show their work, can they? You don’t have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table.”

“Blindsight,” I murmured. You just get a feeling ...

“What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically?

“You set me up,” I said at last. She looked at me. “What do you mean?” “You were talking around me all along, weren’t you? All of you. You didn’t bring me in until I’d been”—how had she put it?—“preconditioned. The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti … attacks me out of nowhere, and—” “We didn’t know about that. Not until the alarm went off.”

forged on. “It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial. You can’t torture the nonsentient or something, and … and I heard you, Susan. It wasn’t news to you, it wasn’t news to anyone except me, and…” And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole Gang and Amanda, too. You’ve been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up. How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

not to discuss it with you,” Susan admitted. “Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I’m out here for!” “He said you’d … resist. Unless it was handled properly.” “Handled— Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—” “We didn’t know he was going to do that. None of us did.” “And he did it why? To win an argument?”

“It matters,” she said, “because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even.”

“It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig you’ve ever had. Aren’t you the user interface, aren’t you the Chinese Room? Aren’t you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone’s shoes, because you figure everyone out from their surfaces?” She stared at Ben’s dark smoldering disk. “Well, there’s your dream date. There’s a whole race of nothing but surfaces. There’s no inside to figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud.”

There was pleading. There were tears. “Imagine you’re a scrambler,” she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads before her face.

The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack. And it’s coming from right about there.

“They’re not even hostile.” Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn’t help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.

Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: Evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence.

“Right answer,” I murmured. “Wrong question.” “What?” “Stretch, remember? When you asked it which objects were in the window.”

“And it missed the scrambler.” James nodded. “So?” “It didn’t miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it saw, the things that existed on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—” “The things it was aware of,” she finished.

thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover,